why their is a lateral inversion not the vertical inversion in the plane mirror?

Question

when we see in mirror why we see our left and right hand opposite to that it is,why we not see our vertical inversion,as head down and legs up???

Answer 1

Because in the mirror, right hand sends light from our right side and left hand sends light from our left side... so in the mirror the person we see appears to have our right hand as his left and left as his right. Our right hand's image appears in the right side of the mirror and left hand's image appears in the left of the mirror so the effect of lateral inversion is seen.
Vertical inversion doesnt occur because the position of the object and image is along the same straight horizontal line in all cases. that's due to the plane of the mirror.

Answer 2

I'm sort of wondering, too
but if I am sitting on the wall
(rotating my horizontal plane 90 degrees)
from my reference I will still have horizontal inversion
but it will actually be vertical inversion from a normal reference, yet no one else in the normal reference will have vertical inversion.

but if you look in an actual mirror, it is just reflecting what is there, so your left turns into right but that's from inside the mirror's reference. just like east would turn into west, north into south, but up not into down.

Answer 3

This was a question I first heard of when I was a child. It was on the TV program "My Three Sons". The concept of right and left is related to a plain direction that is reversed when you look at the image from the opposite direction. You are inverting the plain for this direction (this plain is vertical).

The top and bottom relate to a plain that does not change direction (this plain is horizontal).